Red and Black by Stendhal
Raymond MacKenzie's new translation of one of the 19th century's most unsettling novels
By Stendhal, translated by Raymond N. MacKenzie
592 pages. University of Minnesota Press. $24.95.
I.
Harold Bloom, a critic I no longer have any strong affection for, did nevertheless make one sweeping claim about literature that has stayed with me: a character, Bloom explains, is not merely a fictional representation of a human being. To be even called a character, a fictional person must appear with the same vividness that human beings in our world of reality do - nay, they must be realer than real people. Shakespeare, the greatest of writers, was able to produce dozens of characters, but even some of his lesser plays contain no characters. Dickens was able to muster maybe ten characters. For a novelist of today, writing just one character is a major achievement.
Julien Sorel, the protagonist of Stendhal's novel Red and Black, is certainly a character in Bloom’s sense of the term – he is in fact perhaps the fullest character in all of 19th century fiction. A provincial working-class carpenter’s son who, through his cunning and his intelligence, rises to the upper reaches of Parisian society, Julien is all unruly energy. He is conniving and duplicitous, but also full of immense passion. He has an enormous ego, but can become inordinately attached to those he feels in sympathy with. He yearns to achieve a great name for himself, but can be fickle and unpredictable.
Above all else, Julien admires Napoleon – admires Napoleon like a saint, as an abstract figure embodying the peak of individual greatness. Alas, Julien lives in the France of the 1820s, in the reactionary, stultifying era of the Bourbon Restoration, where the ruling elite views Napoleon with almost as much vituperation as they do the Jacobins. Given these anti-revolutionary environs, Julien does not seek to overthrow the order of the day, but rather achieve a Napoleon-like greatness in any one of the limited number of conventional avenues to power in his day: the church, business, or the social circles of the Parisian aristocracy. To this list may be added the military – in fact, Julien is at his happiest when parading in uniform – but the military is no longer a place for conquering generals to fight wars, but simply another large bureaucracy in which an ambitious young man can network his way to the top.
What makes Julien stand out as a character is the originality of his rise in an era that seems to offer so little in the way of upward mobility. His advancement comes through connections with powerful men, but he is at best a mediocre flatterer, and he possesses a rebellious streak. In fact, he delights in pushing against the current of any given environment he is in. When he is hired as the Latin tutor of a powerful provincial bourgeois, he claims the “holy ministry” which he has dedicated himself to forbids him to read “profane poets” like Horace – which of course, is the only Latin his new boss knows.1 But later in the novel, when enters into a seminary, he quotes from one of Horace’s Odes to his mentor. In both cases, Julien’s instinct is to do the exact opposite of what is socially expected. In a conformist time, Julien makes deliberate shows of non-conformity, risking every form of social censure for some of his off-hand remarks.
Again, Julien is not a revolutionary or even a reformer – in fact, were his boldness to be classified in those terms, his career would have instantly been over. His attitude is not sincere; even though his feelings are genuine, they are surrounded by an artifice. He is “moved by his own fiction, like a playwright.” But the play he creates, one where a young man of obscure origin deserves a place among the aristocracy, is appealing to his superiors. Why this would be so can be explained through the Red and Black’s political context, as I will elaborate in the next section.
II.
The two most famous passages of Red and Black do not contain any of the novel’s principal characters, and barely even mention anything related to the plot. They both come in the voice of the novel’s enigmatic narrator, a fictionalized version of Stendhal himself, one who is wont to interrupt the narrative with incidental commentaries on his story.
In the first passage, Stendhal, after asserting that the success of young men like Julien is dependent on “being closely connected to a particular social set” and that a man without a social set will never get ahead in society, defends his claim this way:
Look, Monsieur, a novel is a mirror being carried along a main road. Sometimes it reflects an azure sky, and sometimes the puddles of mud that form along the road. And the man who’s carrying this mirror in his sack, you accuse him of being immoral! His mirror shows you the mud, and you accuse the mirror! Maybe you ought to accuse the road with mud puddles on it, or better yet the road inspector who lets the water pool up and the mud form.
Just a little later on, as Julien attends a secret gathering of monarchist bigwigs, Stendhal interrupts the narrative, and writes of a conversation that he had with his publisher, who says it would be “graceless” not to provide details of what each man discussed at the gathering. Stendhal, however, argues back, and claims that giving any specifics would be unnecessary:
Politics in the middle of a work of imaginative literature is like a pistol shot in the middle of a concert. The noise is overwhelming, without contributing energy. It doesn’t harmonize with the sound of any of the instruments. Such political material will mortally offend half the readers, and bore the other half, who’ve already been reading more interesting and more energetic political material in their morning paper.
Since my first reading of Red and Black, I had forgotten that Stendhal does actually relent and include the political discussion he had wanted to remove – though all in all, despite the great matters of state being described, it is somewhat stilted and insignificant, its interruption less like a gunshot in a concert and more like a ringtone in a concert. This is not to say, however, that either of the above passages mean that Stendhal wrote Red and Black without political concerns in mind; it is just that his concerns were very different from those of most of his contemporaries.
Politics is everywhere in Red and Black, and it is much more interesting than what Stendhal’s readers would have found in their morning papers. For Stendhal saw that politics (and especially 19th century French politics) is much more than the deliberations of a few powerful men – politics is the clothes people wear, the books they read, their style of conversation. Stendhal did not in fact adopt the perspective of a mirror on a highway – he was far too biased an observer for that. At the same time, he was definitely not partisan, and by forgoing any factional loyalty, Stendhal could see beyond the minor differences among the powerful, and instead examine their hidden ways of holding onto their power.
What Stendhal sees is an exhausted, atrophied political realm. The liberals and the ultras, the two major political tendencies of the French elite at the time, resemble each other to a surprising degree. Neither faction provides serious change, would-be revolutionaries are consigned to the company of foppish young men, and working class politics is nowhere to be found.
Any dissent or serious challenge to the reigning order, even in the purely intellectual realm, is guarded against through an elaborate set of social codes. Rules for manners and dress are of course enough to ward off the lower classes, but there is much more to the social strictures of upper crust French society than that. Stendhal bitterly describes the rules at one dinner party this way: you are not allowed to make jokes “about God, or priests, or the king [...] or anything of long standing,” and you cannot praise “anything that might allow a little free speech.” The young men at the party are “terrified of saying something that might make someone suspect them of having a thought in their heads, or of having been reading some forbidden book.”
Given this environment, one of the signature moods of the novel (and, to Stendhal, one of the signature moods of France at the time) is boredom. The provincial bourgeois are boring, the seminaries are boring, the aristocracy are boring. “Despite the correct tone, the perfect manners, the desire to be agreeable, boredom was evident on every face.”
The success of Julien’s rebellious nature makes sense in this context of intellectual asphyxiation. Julien is an interesting, exciting young man who nevertheless clearly does not actually want to challenge the hegemony of the ruling class. He is a much-needed relief from all the boredom. Stendhal’s supreme sense of irony allows him to see that this disciple of the idea of Napoleon easily becomes a part of an extremely mediocre milieu.
III.
But Julien is not the only figure in the novel who fits with Bloom’s definition of a character. Julien’s two lovers, Madame de Rênal and Mathilde de la Mole, are every bit the characters that he is. For this review, I will focus on Mathilde, for I had forgotten what a vivid personality she was, and because she embodies, even more than Julien, Stendhal’s gift for social and political commentary through perfectly realized individuals.
Over the course of the novel, Julien, in bildungsroman fashion, makes his way from a tutor in a small town, to a seminary student in a mid-sized city, to finally being assistant to a powerful aristocrat in Paris. Mathilde is the daughter of this aristocrat (she is eighteen or nineteen, a bit younger than Julien); at first, Julien only sees her as haughty, affected, and shallow, but soon she reveals that she too is disgusted by the dullness of the French aristocracy, and seeks something more exciting than what is on offer from her social set.
Mathilde understands, better than anyone else in the novel, that, when the paths to revolution or reform are closed off, a radical, ambitious spirit can only take refuge in transgression. She embraces the reactionary attitudes of her time, but does so in a way that undermines and shocks the status quo. She is ardently Catholic, but her Catholicism is one of strange rituals and symbols, a desire for submission and self-abnegation, and adventures undertaken out of divine inspiration. She reifies the nobility and aristocratic lineages, but only to contrast “the heroic age” of long-ago lords with the complacent elite of her time.
She does not seek to be an independent woman and sees gender relations in a decidely traditionalist way, but also finds all the men in her world to be lacking, aside from the low-born Julien Sorel. She claims that “it was only in the court of Henri III [in the 16th century] that you could find men who were great both by character and by birth.” When, in the throes of love, she refers to Julien as “my master” in front of her family, it is the most shocking incident of the novel.
She is the prototype of a figure that would bloom in France (and Europe more broadly) in the late nineteenth and early 20th century: the aesthetic radical who is conservative in politics, the wealthy layabout who derives a subversive thrill from binding herself to ancient hierarchies.
I have been focusing on the social commentary of Red and Black in this review, but be assured that this is a profoundly literary novel. Stendhal supplies a rhetorical invention and sardonic wit to even the most routine incidents of French life, and Raymond MacKenzie is an able translator of these subtleties. What struck me most of all in my latest reading of Red and Black was the density of allusion. Even beyond Stendhal’s famously strange chapter epigrams (many of which he made up himself and falsely attributed to famous authors), references to minor incidents in French history and obscure theological debates are scattered throughout the novel, often deployed in Stendhal’s own tricksterish fashion.
This surfeit of contextual information, as well as lending a unique texture to the novel, also seems to depict the foundations of what would become the French culture wars in the age of Dreyfus and the decadents. The aspects of life that the novel’s characters saw as social trivialities or outside the realm of politics would soon (as Stendhal seems to have foreseen) become contested issues. Questions of nationality, religion, class, race, and gender would divide France and encroach their way into even the most boring salons.
Red and Black was at the printers as the July Revolution of 1830 France took place, overthrowing the Bourbon Monarchy. For a novel so immersed in the particular social and political details of that time period, the fact that the object of his critique was about to collapse hardly registers in our opinion of it. Red and Black is still an unsettling, powerful work of fiction in our own day, when the idea of monarch, nobility, and clerical rule (in the US at least) are extinct ideas. What Stendhal had seen in the Bourbon Monarchy was the problems of modernity itself.
At this point in the novel, Julien’s limited education has only exposed him to Christian Latin texts, and not authors like Horace; the fact that he frames his ignorance as one of religious commitment, and not one of lack of opportunities, however, is significant.
This is an amazing review— I’m keeping an eye out for this on my next bookstore trip. Sounds a bit like Lost Illusions!